Facebook Exodus – NYTimes.com

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50992.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1404

Excellent. The centralisers and greedy absorbers may be about to experience a bit of a downturn. This has already happened in several countries and seems to be heading towards North America too. For all of its brilliance (giving credit where credit is due, Facebook is in many ways state-of-the-art in its design of self-organising social spaces) the centralised model it insists upon is not. Shunning interconnectedness, networkability and open standards except where it lets them suck you further to the centre is either a) doomed to eventual failure or b) going to take over the world. I really don’t see the latter happening. Centralised models are simply not resilient or flexible enough in the long term, no matter how well built a system might be to negate some of the more pernicious effects.

I like the Yeats quote in this article but hope that the lines that follow in the poem don’t come to pass:

‘mere anarchy is loosed up on the world’. What we actually need is a federated model using well-defined standards and protocols that do not lock us into one provider, which put real control into the hands of end-users, and which allow a highly variegated and interconnected ecosystem to evolve.
Created:Sun, 06 Sep 2009 17:43:35 GMT

College for $99 a Month

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50976.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1403

“…these huge changes will also seriously threaten the ability of universities to provide all the things beyond teaching on which society depends: science, culture, the transmission of our civilization from one generation to the next.”

Many interesting things about this development and others like it. On the one hand it is wonderful that the approach puts learners in control, provides materials and community, all for a single low fixed monthly price that lifts barriers to education for many that would otherwise be excluded. The model makes perfect economic sense as long as there are not too many students like the one described in this article, who worked 18 hours a day to get her qualifications. On the other hand it is another step towards the commoditisation of the creation of knowledge, a market-driven approach in which only the strong will survive.

I’m currently reading Howard Bloom’s magnificent ‘Global Brain’ which makes a forcible point for the need for diversity generators: non-conformist approaches that send out feelers into the evolutionary landscape and explore possible futures and different ways of being. Market-driven colleges of the type described in this article are what Bloom calls conformity enforcers: despite catering for individuals so well they must necessarily avoid the unprofitable avenues and, in so doing, reinforce the status quo even more than our traditional institutions (magnified still further by their use of bought-in commercial educational course offerings).

For all their many many faults, our traditional universities are pretty good diversity generators: the ivory tower is not all bad inasmuch as it affords scope and freedom to explore beyond the boundaries of practical and economically viable concerns. Most of the time this leads nowhere but, just occasionally, it enables breakthroughs that simply wouldn’t happen in a more pragmatic world. More importantly than the exploration of ideas new to the world, perhaps, is that it also offers that space for anyone who is able to join in – a space for young people in particular to grow and explore their boundaries and, sometimes, to leap over them. Our universities and colleges are in desperate need of reform but, in the process, as a society we must keep their valuable functions.

I hope we in the institutional sector of higher education find another battle ground to fight on than in the increasingly crowded space of cheap and flexible courses. Apart from anything else, we will certainly lose that battle.

Universities still have a dominant role in the creation of at least some kinds of new knowledge so it would make sense to take advantage of that. When universities first formed it was because they made it easier for people to come and hang out with great scholars and become part of a rich scholarly learning community. I reckon we should return to our roots here. What universities (at least currently) can offer that education-as-a-commodity brokers cannot yet aspire to is the opportunity to not only read the books but to hang out with the people who write them.

However, this might change.

An interesting and growing trend is that many of the great and the good in the guru category are reaching out beyond the walled garden into networked communities, notably in blogs and social networks that have little or nothing to do with the institutions in which they work. Most institutions short-sightedly offer very little support for that kind of outreach (I am very lucky to work for two that do). What they *can* (and sometimes do) offer is the opportunity to be part of gurus’ small groups, rather than just their broader networks. If I were running StraighterLine then I’d probably want to start to poach that territory too. Once that starts to happen then the old gang needs a pretty good strategy to deal with it.
Created:Sat, 05 Sep 2009 22:04:35 GMT

(a)social computing conference

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50878.html

I've just spent three rewarding and exhausting days at the IEEE Social Computing Conference in Vancouver.

It was an odd experience for me as by far the majority of papers and presentations seemed to have a lot to do with computing (most predominantly various forms of network analysis and visualisation, plus a fair bit on technologies of privacy and security) and very little to do with 'social'. One of the more spectacularly glaring omissions was any notable use of social technologies before, during or after the conference, apart from a few bottom-up initiatives. In fact, given that this was a computing conference, use of computers was altogether pretty dire, with the most appallingly designed registration process I have ever encountered, that suggest its designers had never considered users let alone followed anything like a user-centred design process. The conference website is something out of the 1990s. At least the network was fine, but that was provided by the hotel.

A few speakers asked people in the audience about their use of various social systems and it was more than slightly bizarre to be among the minority of delegates using big players like Facebook, Digg, Flickr and Twitter, let alone less popular social apps. I find it almost incomprehensible that some social software programmers can be so utterly divorced from the use of the things that they are studying and developing. Except that, as a breed, computer scientists are not known to be the most sociable of people.

Despite this gaping hole, there were some great people and there was some good stuff to be found there including fine sessions from Ben Shneiderman, Bebo White, Barry Smyth, a big contingent of creative folk from MIT MediaLab, and many more. There was some fascinating research relating to the use of sensors and wearable devices and even the mainstream of network analysis and visualisation papers, as well as those considering privacy, security and access control, held some great potential insights and discoveries. Again, however, it was depressing to see how few had performed any follow-ups or studies with real people to find out what social factors might be lurking behind the effects they were seeing in the abstracted data or how their designs might be used by real people. A panel hosted by Jenny Preece followed up Ben Schneiderman's talk in considering the big ethical and related issues that social software engenders, which was refreshing and a necessary counterpoint to all this abstraction of humans into nodes and edges, but it stood out from the mainstream themes as a distinct oddity.

The conference certainly helped to inspire me with some ideas, refinements of ideas and issues I'd not thought about well enough before, so it was well worthwhile, but if that was 'social computing' I hate to imagine what it might be like without the 'social'!

Social software programmer/researcher wanted (Canada)

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50755.html

Terry Anderson and I are leading a small project at Athabasca University in Alberta, Canada taking a design-based research approach to exploring ways of using social software for learning.

We need someone with a computing degree or equivalent experience to extend and improve aspects of Elgg, as well as to integrate and mash it up with other systems (specifically Moodle and the Project Wonderland immersive environment). PHP and/or Java programming experience would be useful. The post holder will also research and evaluate the effectiveness of interventions using the software so will need to be a great communicator, ideally with experience of participative approaches to design and/or qualitative and quantitative research methods.

The things we are trying to do will hopefully be of benefit to anyone in education who wants to use Elgg as their social software. We hope this will be ground-breaking work that will lead to publications etc, so it would be good for someone wanting to break into learning technologies research.

This post can be remotely located, but occasional visits to Edmonton, Alberta would be required, and Canadian residents and citizens will be considered before anyone else.

Full details are available at https://athabascau.hua.hrsmart.com/ats/js_job_details.php?reqid=469

Statistics Show Social Media Is Bigger Than You Think

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50936.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1402

Some great ‘hey wow!’ statistics and facts about social media use of the sort one tends to see a lot in keynotes. Not all of the facts are reliable or significant but there’s a very good list of sources to verify their plausibility and, while we might quibble with the odd detail here and there, the overall message is clear: this stuff is *big*.
Created:Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:26:00 GMT

New WebGL standard aims for 3D Web without browser plugins

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50555.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1401

It looks like the 3D Web is nearing reality. The current generation of general-purpose immersive spaces (e.g. Second Life, There, Wonderland, OpenSim etc) are clunky, poorly-interoperable, resource-hungry monoliths that help to show the potential but are really not ready for mass adoption. These two initiatives (WebGL and O3D) should be exactly what is needed to build a truly standards-compliant and open immersive web. I recall similar arguments in the early to mid nineties about VRML and later X3D but maybe this is the bit of the puzzle that means we get the real thing at last!
Created:Fri, 07 Aug 2009 20:47:00 GMT

MyTrybe

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/50298.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1399

A collective approach to social networking. Instead of explicit friending, the system finds people like you and clusters those into your network.

I guess the big issue is the control that the creators exert in the choice of aspects that are considered in establishing similarity. You can select styles which establish the context that is of interest to you at a given time, each of which uses a set of explicit questions to find out about you (valuable info!). I suspect it could have some potentially interesting applications in education, especially on the informal and lifelong learning front, if it were to be open-sourced. Not so useful as a closed service like this.
Created:Wed, 29 Jul 2009 22:29:33 GMT

Twitter hype punctured by study

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45582.html

Full story at: http://jondron.net/cofind/frshowresource.php?tid=5325&resid=1398

Is it possible that anyone is surprised by the news that 10% of Twitter users are responsible for 90% of the tweets? Or that over half Tweet less than once every 74 days? I suppose it is interesting when compared with the social network norm (10% produce 30% of the content) but it is certainly not newsworthy nor does it show anything unexpected about Twitter. There was no hype bubble to burst.

The study’s authors suggest that this makes it a one-to-many publishing service as though that is a bad thing. Of course, it *would* be a bad thing if there were any limits on who could publish, but there are not (well, censorship issues to one side for a moment).

It is much more interesting that, in the space of year, it grew by 1382%. That’s a big number – even Facebook only grew 228% in the same period. I’d be inclined to put that down to a few factors apart from the usual variants on Metcalfe’s law:

1) it’s very fast, very simple, very easy to get going – there is little investment needed in time, attention, computer power, etc

2) It exploits multiple technologies and their associated networks – not just computers but cellphones – and it fits neatly in everything from a widget to a web page.

3) unlike phone, email or SMS, it’s a push technology that doesn’t usually intrude too much or demand a response – even if it distracts, for most of us the 140 character limit keeps the distraction small, even less than RSS feeds.

4) Media hype and prominent celeb twitterers – there’s something very intimate and immediate about tweets that makes the view into someone’s personal life compulsive reading with very little effort.This certainly gave a boost.

5) Perhaps most importantly, it can ride on the back of other social networks. Despite their best belated efforts to compete, Twitter started by competing with no one and so was able to take full advantage of people exchanging info about their Twitter profiles on many social networks like Facebook, email, MySpace, etc. Throw in a dead simple API that makes it easy to integrate with other sites, so there is very little reinvestment in building a new social network needed, and it is almost surprising that it did not grow any faster. It is a compelling symbiotic (or maybe a bit parasitic) organism that thrives on other networks as well as building its own.

I find it interesting not so much for what it is but as an example of the way we must go forwards – to build small, open, agile, flexible, integratable services that enable a federation of networks and functionalities, building on what is already there and evolving fast. It is more than likely that Twitter will some day crash and burn or, more probably, get sucked into the genetic material of something else, but that is the nature of evolution and nothing to cry about.

Created:Fri, 12 Jun 2009 03:21:48 GMT

What exams have taught me

http://community.brighton.ac.uk/jd29/weblog/45251.html

I have argued at some length on numerous occasions that exams, especially in their traditional unseen, time-limited, paper-based form, without access to books or Internet or friends, are the work of the devil and fundamentally wrong in almost every way that I can think of. They are unfair, resource-intensive, inauthentic, counter-productive, anti-educational, disspiriting, soulless products of a mechanistic age that represent an ethos that we should condemn as evil.

And yet they persist.

I have been wondering why something so manifestly wrong should maintain such a hold on our educational system even though it is demonstrably anti-educational. Surely it must be more than a mean-spirited small-minded attempt to ensure that people are who they say they are?

I think I have the answer.

Exams are so much a part of our educational system that pervade almost every subject area that they teach a deeper, more profound set of lessons than any of the subjects that they relate to. Clearly, from their ubiquity, they must relate to more important and basic things to learn than, say, maths, languages, or history. Subjects may come and subjects may go but the forms of assessment remain startlingly constant. So, I have been thinking about what exams taught me:

  • that slow, steady, careful work is not worth the hassle – a bit of cramming (typically one-three days seemed to work for me) in a mad rush just before the event works much more effectively and saves a lot of time
  • the corollary – adrenalin is necessary to achieve anything worth achieving
  • that the most important things in life generally take around three hours to complete
  • that extrinsic motivation, the threat of punishment and the lure of reward, is more important than making what we do fun, enjoyable and intrinsically rewarding
  • that we are judged not on what we achieve or how we grow but on how well we can display our skills in an intense, improbably weird and disconcerting setting

I learnt to do exams early in life better than I learnt most of the subjects I was examined on and have typically done far better than I deserve in such circumstances. I have learnt my lessons well in real life. I (mostly) hit deadlines with minutes to spare and seldom think about them more than a day or two in advance. I perform fairly well in adrenalin-producing circumstances. I summarise and display knowledge that I don’t really have to any great extent. I extemporise. I do things because I fear punishment or crave reward. I play to the rules even when the rules are insane. A bit of high blood pressure comes with the territory. Sometimes this is really useful but I am really trying hard to get out of the habit of always working this way and tp adopt some other approaches sometimes.

There are many other lessons that our educational systems teach us beyond the subject matter – I won’t even begin to explore what we learn from sitting in rows, staying quiet and listening to an authority figure tell us things but, suffice it to say, I haven’t retained much knowledge of grammar, calculus, geography or technical drawing, but I am still unlearning attitudes and beliefs that such bizarre practices instilled in me.

Assessment is good. Assessment tells us how we are doing, where we need to try new things, different approaches, as well as what we are doing right. Assessment is a vital part of the learning process, whether we do it ourselves or get feedback from others (both is best). But assessment should not be the goal. Assessment is part of the process.

Accreditation is good too. Accreditation tells the world that we can do what we claim we can do. it is important that there are ways to verify to others that we are capable (most obviously in the case of people on whom others depend greatly such as surgeons, bus drivers and university professors). Except in cases where the need to work under enormous pressure in unnatural conditions is a prerequisite (there are some occasions) I would just prefer that we relied on authentic evidence rather than this frighteningly artificial process that tells us very little about how people actually perform in the task domain that they are learning in.

The biggest problem comes when we combine and systematise assessment and accreditation into an industrialised, production-line approach to education, losing sight of the real goals. There are many other ways to do this that are less harmful or even positively useful (e.g. portfolios, evidence-based assessment, even vivas when done with care and genuine dialogue) and many are actually used in higher education. We just need more of them to redress the balance a bit.